Anxiety is my other name

Anxiety, for me, is not the second album created by the alternative rock/post-grunge music group Smile Empty Soul (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety (album) ). Rather, it is an unpleasant, emotional and relatively permanent state in my life that involves a rather complex combination of emotions that include, but is not limited to at any time; fear, apprehension, and worry ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety ) The varying degrees of fear, apprehension and worry fluctuate wildly throughout any given day.



Logically, I realise that this is because I am a 52nd generation member in a very long line of anxious people in my family. I have spoken before about my mother’s perennial question “can you do that?” that sticks with me to this day. If you can’t control it you have to be anxious about it. My flight or fight switch is permanently in high gear. Thanks Mum.



I also thank the Sister of No Mercy who taught me from age 5 to 12. They applied guilt and anxiety along with hell and brimstone, and a fair degree of corporal punishment, but that is an issue for another day. Let us just say that their not so tender unmercies certainly did nothing to soothe an anxious, shy child.



How anxious you ask? I can not listen to phone-in competitions on breakfast radio while driving to work in my car. As soon as someone is put on the spot and has to remember the 2nd line of the song played just before the 7am news, yesterday, I tense up and have to switch off the radio until I judge that it is all over and can switch back on to the music. I empathise too much. I feel their stress, their anxiety, their desperation to win that double pass to have smallpox vaccinations. Too much to bear.



I took pills for awhile, but then I started to get anxious about the medication I was taking. Long term effects? How long should I take the pills? If it says take once a day, is it better to take in the morning, or the evening? ….zillions of anxious queries and issues rising in my head again.



Anxiety is not all bad. It does let you write “I have great attention to detail” on your resume and mean it. I have “midnight epiphanies” where I wake in the middle of the night and think “NO! I forgot to reply to the email about the boobahs” and I cannot go back to sleep until I get out of bed, log on remotely to my office and send that email. Like someone is waiting at 3am to receive my missive.



A friend handles it better. If she has a midnight epiphany she just grabs something off her bedside table and throws it at the door. In the morning that thing lying on the floor reminds her of the issue and she deals with it. If only. I would worry that one of my kids would fall over the item just inside the doorway. After I threw my lamp I would eventually have to get out of bed and retrieve it. Then I would have to think of a new place to put the lamp to remind me about the thing that woke me up to worry in the first place. I would have to change that lamp’s position three times. By now day light would be peeping through my windows and I have to also worry that I will now be tired at work all day.



Would I be less anxious if I let go of my anxiety regarding my anxiety? Celebrated it even? I could have an ANXIETY party with an anxious looking piñata that I danced under while pulverising with a stick, thus representing the letting go of my anxieties. I fear that the sight of me in high party mode may frighten my few remaining friends and make them anxious about me, or at least my stick.



Or should I just embrace my anxiety and acknowledge it for what it is? Acknowledge that I will always walk back to the car, twice, to check that I did actually lock it the first time. No longer fight the fact that I will always make my daughters pack a jacket, even on holiday to Fiji.



I am 52 in 4 months time. Is it too late for a mature dog to lean new tricks ( would they be too hard, too complicated, too physical?? Or should I just go with the established status quo and keep harrying the bone? Make anxiety my friend?



I am not going to sleep tonight, am I?